


Conscience

by wanderlustlover



Series: Wanderlustlover's Yuletides [9]
Category: Revenge (TV)
Genre: Misses Clause Challenge, Multi, Yuletide 2013
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-20
Updated: 2013-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-05 06:49:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1090886
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Nolan knows she won't come today, but when he closes his eyes he hopes she will anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Conscience

**Author's Note:**

  * For [meridian_rose (meridianrose)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/meridianrose/gifts).



> Set during the time with Nolan is in jail previous to Season Three.

Morning is steel grey and blinding white.

  
The light from outside sliding slippery and slick in translucent beams through the bars on the high window, painting lines on the wall above the bed. If he were home he'd bury his head under a pillow and a sheet with the highest thread count possible.   
  
But he isn't home, and this room isn't his sprawling bedroom tucked away and decorated with touches of careless opulence, in the back of his South Hampton mansion. There's no universal remote, remade in his spare time while bored and itching with inspiration, to control the lights, music, temperature, and every electronic device within forty feet of the bed.  
  
It'll only be that ancient, pockmarked, worn, and obviously white washed wall, standing there dull and dumb and unwavering, picking up every mote of light until it's screaming at him through the back of his eyelids, until he can't fight it off anymore. Making him tick off another day on the unseen tally in his head. Making him remember he really is in jail, as the price of trying to take down the Initiative.  
  
That he hasn't touched a computer in so many weeks that it's become a permanent itch shivering and shuddering under his skin, like a sweater he can't take off, or even shift the cuffs on to alleviate the smallest part of the burn. The sick, dull wash of his stomach clarifying as the light comes into focus making room for the things that are even worse. That have left holes shape like themselves under his skin.  
  
Night fears clinging like shadows that found a way to hide inside the light. He can't stop himself from counting them like tics, too. He wonders where they all are now, weeks from the last up to date news blast. He doesn’t know what is happening. The Graysons. The Initiative. The end date for Carrion’s failsafe. Jack and Carl. Aiden, and Emily.   
  
First and last, and in every stray thought, ranging from sharp, bitter, sickening blame to that inconsolable, irrepressible, gnawing worry -- _Emily_.   
  
Nolan knows she won't come today, but when he closes his eyes he hopes she will anyway.  
  


* * *

  
  
Midday is for watching the shadows creep down the wall.  
  
It is for watching the sun move the day in ways he'd never had a single reason to consider, and re-evaluating the hell David must have gone through every day before his death. The bland walls and blander floors. The desperate hope that someone would come when visiting hours came, and then the despondent annoyance when more than half the time it was lawyers, reporters, or city officials.   
  
He didn't crash a plane -- not that David Clark did either; not that Nolan ever thought he did or could -- but Carrion had been his, even if it’d been stolen and used in ways he never designed it to be. The fake testimony from Fa1con and the forced confession from Padma, under duress, before her murder, had been the only nails the court needed for his coffin. Even if no one ever knew the whole story.

The way they never knew the whole story about David Clark.  
  
The way no one even dreamed this event was connected to all of those.   
  
Dominoes like crumbs of computer code all so carefully embedded along the way.   
  
He's more at fault than David ever was. David who cared about his daughter and NolCorp and Grayson Global, until one had betrayed him and the other was the only means by which to save the third, first, and most important thing in his world. Nolan had culpability, and a contingency. They would kick in, had already somewhere, but he still wasn’t sure how long it would be before it came back to freeing him.

How long he’d be pacing the walls, and writing equations in the dust accumulating on the floor, before the failsafe cleared his name after turning itself on exposing most of the Initiative. 

Thinking of The Initiative was like dropping an ice cube down his own spine when he was stuck in this tiny space with only four walls. Wouldn't, and can't, put it past them that he's being watched here. Like David was, before he was murdered and it was called a suicide. He'd nearly jumped anytime anyone came for him in the beginning, before he realized no one was coming. That he wasn't important enough for Them to come for.

Just important enough to be punished and left to rot in this tiny, colorless space with nothing but cement, metal, porcelain, and sheets as starched and worn as the clothes he'd been wearing for weeks. Which was fine by him. The longer they considered their hands washed of him, the further Carrion’s failsafe would spread while they were unaware.  
  
He had too much time to think over how he got here. Where it all started. To count the names and faces of people he didn't memorize. Not the way Emily did. Until each one was pressed into her mind the way flowers, summers and family holidays should have been. But he isn't here because of those people, even if Emily would argue he is.  
  
But he'll always know that isn't as true for him the way it is for her.   
  
He's only here, every _here_ he finds himself in, because of two people.   
  
David Clark, who was better to him than he'll ever be able to repay, and Amanda Clark, who needs him more than she'll ever be able admit or allow. He was the only person to stand next to one, and he keeps finding it impossible to even consider walking away from the other, even as the price rises faster and higher with each summer.   
  
From everything this has made of her, and him with her.  
  
Nolan knows she won't come today, but when he closes his eyes he hopes she will anyway.  
  


* * *

  
  
Evening is social, or what passes for the joke of social.  
  
Drab big rooms, with harsh, high lights, where he plays chess against people who were nowhere near as good as a computerize opponent with increasable difficulty levels, and learned it was better not talking to anyone than it was asking questions and trying to befriend anyone. Evening is the time of the day he feels loneliest. More lonely than even that numb, echoing, empty cell.  
  
When he hungered for a known face, for someone who understood him. Evenings when his thoughts were poisoned with the remembrances of smiles and laughter and being touched. The colossal failures of Tyler and Marco, and the horrifying ups and downs of Padma. Of the way he was held and killed, the price she paid for being near him.   
  
It was for pacing, too quickly, thinking about Jack in the Stow Away, with Carl, but without FauxAmanda and even more, without Declan. Another person who knew not enough and was paying for the sin of lacking that knowledge in blood at every turn. Who had dots of truth, but not enough to connect them and make sense of how and why his world had been turned upside down, how deep the rabbit hole went and how its hooks had been sunk in to him since he was a child playing on that beach, too.  
  
The stupendous arrogance Nolan had in thinking he was safe enough, rich enough, a genius enough to outwit the odds. That he could have something, someone, anyone of them that wasn't touched by all this blood and betrayal. Something perfect and precious, filled with laughter and jokes, or honest feelings, prized carefully one by one into another hand, a hand that wasn't his, until he was certain he wasn't drifting alone in an endless sea with only one other person.   
  
The way it hadn't even been one more person before he gave Amanda the box.  
  
The journals, that made him culpable to every action she took after realizing the truth, and made her the second person inhabiting a world he had for so long carried as solely his to know and own and bear. His to prepare to hand down, and he thought he had been prepared. But he'd never been prepared for this. Even with all her training and certainty, he doesn't think Emily had been entirely either.   
  
She never admits it, but she is the cardinal example of how the plan and the result are so different.   
  
Nolan knows she won't come today, but when he closes his eyes he hopes she will anyway.  
  


* * *

  
  
Midnight is a black that is never dark enough.   
  
The lights inside the cells are turned off, but the running lights outside for the guards are still on. Buzzing and blinking dully, like no one has updated them since before he was even born. Not dark enough to drown the night, and not light enough to allow him any peace from the distraction of it.   
  
The similarly dull, and unending, want to fix it or break it, burrowed deep in his head. Deep enough he can forget it for hours in the day and then the lights turn out, bringing them back, reminding him like a sharp ache on a bruise you forget you had until you ran into something, setting off the pain all over again. That's midnight here.   
  
Midnight, when he closes his eyes only to open them, and can't forget the reasons he's really here. The promise that had changed his life forever -- that he'd make sure David’s daughter, Amanda, knew. What had really happened. About his framing, about the crash of flight 197. He'd never known then this was where he'd end up keeping it. He wouldn't change his promise, but he'd never known then, couldn't have supposed in his wildest dreams.   
  
Amanda, Emily. Emily, Amanda. Amanda, the angry girl, bounced from detention hall to detention hall, until she was old enough to escape that. On paper at least. The only way she ever escaped anything. Emily, the new philanthropist darling of the South Hamptons, with a ready smile and the even more ready checkbook. Not really one. Not really the other.  
  
Not really anything except her quest, her legacy, her vendetta, to take down everyone who'd been involved in the framing, and then murdered, of her father. A single soul, with a single mission. At least that was what she said, what she did, and maybe even what she believed. But he knew better. Even on the nights he wished he'd never kept that promise, never been there every time she came back, with those desperate, sharp eyes.  
  
He knows she fears being made to be Amanda and made to suffer like Amanda did again. He knows she gets lost in being Emily, and being with Daniel, all the time. Knows she might be his 'Em's,' as some compromise he works as an acknowledgement of all the masks she isn't, but she was still in there, too. The little girl who existed before all of them, without anything but anger and hurt over everything brutally ripped from her.   
  
The girl who cared so much she gone all but mad with it. Who'd become his friend even though she resisted every step of his help and his friendship. Who needed him to be the conscience and humanity she'd worked so hard to rip out wholesale so that she could do this one thing in her father's name.  
  
Being here because of his involvement with her wasn't the worst.

Worse was counting each day knowing there was no one to keep her grounded now.   
  
Nolan knows she won't come tomorrow, but when he closes his eyes he hopes she will anyway.


End file.
